The myth of the ‘Arabs versus Jews’ narrative
►http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/myth-%E2%80%98arabs-versus-jews%E2%80%99-narrative
In Sephardim in Israel: Zionism From The Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims Ella Shohat, a self-identified Arab-Jew and Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University, argues that the consequences of Zionism not only extend to the Palestinians but to the Sephardim, who she refers to as Oriental Jews, whose voices have been silenced by Zionism. In the 1988 edition of the academic journal Social Text, published by Duke University Press, Shohat describes that even at the earliest stages of the Arab protest of Zionism there were clear distinctions made by Arabs between Zionists and Jews. An example of this Shohat provides was from the manifesto of the first Palestinian convention of February 1919 and “a Nazareth area petition” distributed during massive protests in 1920 which went on to denounce the Balfour Declaration, stating in part that “the Jews are people of our country who lived with us before the occupation, they are our brothers, people of our country and all the Jews of the world are our brothers.”
Shohat notes that not only did Zionism aim to uproot Arab-Jewish communities in Palestine but that the Sephardim were made to choose between what she called an “anti-Zionist “Arabness” and a pro-Zionist “Jewishness”, and so “for the first time in Sephardi history”, she writes, "Arabness and Jewishness were posed as antonym”…